


Bonus round 4 - fill 4

by oyogihodai (alder_knight)



Series: SASO 2016 fills [16]
Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Artists, Curses, Gen, M/M, Mentioned Matsuoka Gou, Mentioned Matsuoka Rin, Mermaids, Merman Nanase Haruka, Not Beta Read, There's A Tag For That, To Be Edited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 22:38:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7549987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alder_knight/pseuds/oyogihodai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><a href="http://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/15224.html?thread=6779512#cmt6779512">Prompt</a>:</p><p>
  <i>"From the bottom of my glittering sea, I'm in terrible need of a muse.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Sitting on the shore of my green, blue and glittering sea<br/>The waves recede and creep right back, away and back to me.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Just like the image of your smile, that I've only seen in dreams<br/>- the curve that forms upon your lips, that I can draw from memory." - Alejandra Rehuel</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bonus round 4 - fill 4

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magnum_mouth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnum_mouth/gifts).



Haruka presses the tips of his fingers into shells filled with pigment, and color trails off them as he draws his hand up and away. This deep, the ocean current is negligible, but enough light still filters down for him to work. The bioluminescent fish caged near the base of these stones makes up the difference. Haruka tosses her a treat, folds his tail neatly beneath himself, and begins. 

He works in a variety of media, depending on the application. Today he spreads thick pigment onto a large woven mat. In a few days he’ll carefully brush it off, leaving the image stained into the mat’s surface. A widow in the city has commissioned a series of original hangings, and that is what Haruka means to work on this morning. Somehow, though, he's having trouble focusing. 

Perhaps if he lets himself work free-form first, he'll get it out of his system. 

Dark and bright reds smear vibrantly over the canvas, then fuchsia, black, violet, as Haruka sends one hand to work applying pigment and the other darting about, blending and smoothing. It's an abstract image, of a sort Haruka has been painting a lot lately. His work has always been primarily shades of blue and green and gray, reflecting the seas around him with uncanny impressionist likeness, and that is what has earned him his strong artistic reputation. This new direction of his work is threatening his continued viability, much to his irritation. 

Worse yet, he suspects he knows its cause. 

Haruka makes his own pigments using his own formulas, slightly different than anyone else's and strictly secret, as all of the craftsfolk do. A certain royal purple has gained in popularity among patrons recently, and for that color Haruka must venture near to the shore to harvest the mollusks that produce it. For the past fortnight, in order to get to the island he frequents in his harvesting, he's had to pass a new fishing boat.

Two humans work the boat - young fisherman and wife, Haruka had assumed at first, but his careful listening has revealed them to be sister and brother. They talk of their father sometimes. The sea took him away and left them only a mother and a boat. They use it to provide for themselves and for her. 

They're beautiful, the both of them - Haruka generally cares for human appearances about as much as for those of the mackerel he eats for dinner, but even he can tell that these are two exceptional specimens. Their hair is brilliant red and fans around them in the ocean wind like the fins of a betta fish, and they both look healthy and strong. But something sets them apart, and it's been driving Haruka to obsession for days. 

Haruka pauses, fingers deep in his pigment pots. Not obsessed, he corrects himself. Just curious. 

The young woman, he has surmised from the clairvoyance that comes so easily to dwellers of the ocean, will live long into old age. She will have a husband, and children, and grandchildren, and be loved and cared for until her peaceful death. 

Her brother, however, is a marked man. 

The curse that took their father hangs dark and heavy around him. Haruka spreads red and black across woven fibers, willing himself to stop thinking about the beautiful young man with his strange forked limbs, but it only rekindles his frustrating urge to return to the surface, to watch him again, to take in this transient beauty before it's snatched from the living world. 

In an uncharacteristically brusque motion, Haruka tears the finished artwork from his easel, throws it to drift down onto a stack of similar works, and puts aside his pigments. With a sigh of vexation and a cluck of affection to his caged fish, he slings a knotted cord bag across his back and swims out between the rocks, headed for the surface.

**Author's Note:**

> I would love to write 10 000 words on this but such is SASO life. T_T
> 
> (the glowing pet fish's name is loosey-kun.)


End file.
